What’s going on? Summer Update……

Having just got back from holiday (first time to Croatia, fantastic place and time!) it’s time to take (a bit of) stock and think about what’s next for all of our work on next generation access (NGA) digital infrastructure. For the past few months we’ve been ploughing ahead with the Corridor project, more about that later, and waiting to see what might happen with regional funding for a much bigger project which could start rolling out NGA across Greater Manchester. Now that regional funding is ……facing problems (polite term) we are actively looking at alternative and more innovative business models that could find other ways of finding the investment needs to start building an advanced fibre to the premises (FTTP) network across the city region. Now that Metrolink is going to be developed in full, which is great news, there must be opportunities to roll out NGA alongside the new and refurbished tracks. So we are hoping to go “TFON” (you heard it here first), creating a “Tramside Fibre Open Network” which could provide the core of a city-region-wide digital development zone, creating a world class transformational digital infrastructure, with three main objectives:

To safeguard, support and further the Manchester city region’s position as a globally important centre for digital industries in Europe by promoting the development locally of the next wave of digital applications and services that rely on a modern digital infrastructure;

To promote the use of new transformational digital applications and services among the city region’s businesses and citizens, with resulting benefits for business efficiency and social inclusion;

To enable improved quality and improved efficiency in the delivery of public sector services in the city region.